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So I’m a fan of cars and, because you are reading this scraping from the barrel of my genius, I’m going to assume you are too (more likely though, you are someone I’ve guilt-tripped into reading this because you know me. Or perhaps a bit of both. Either way, welcome!). Well anyway, unless you have had your head inserted firmly into your lower colon for the last few years, you’ll know that everyone is up in arms about cars. The number on the road, the amount of CO2 per kilometre that they produce, the number of people killed by them etc.

The M25, yesterday. Ignore the fact that it's sunny and all the cars are all fitted with foreign number plates and driving on the wrong side of the road. Thanks.

And these are all worthy things that should be worried over. Now I’m not going to talk about the number on the road or safety because….well, because that’s dull. I mean yesterday I talked about killer robots, for Chrissakes! But I’ve had a thought recently and I’m going to share it with you. Of all the cars circumnavigating the M25 right now, what percentage of those do you reckon are car enthusiasts? I’m going to say 15%, max. And yet 100% of those cars going around and around and around the M25 are almost certainly contributing to CO2 production. Do you see where I’m going with this? You’ve got 85% of people who’d be just as happy driving a DFS sofa with an engine in the back of it, driving around, melting the icecaps, giving us real drivers a bad name and, frankly, ruining a thing that I love, namely driving fossil-fuel powered cars at a vast rate of. And it’s these people who moan at Top Gear for letting its presenters drive around fast, unenvironmental cars: look you bastards! This is the last vestige for car lovers, because you’ve ruined everything else with your stupid Nissan Micras! Can we please enjoy a mere 3 people driving around in cars with V12s whilst you and literally billions like you trundle around in your crappy four-cylinder cars doing cumulatively far greater damage!

Let us petrolhead idiots be! OK, this picture's not making a strong case....

Anyway, I digress, because it’s all going to be OK. Because what I hope will happen is that, instead of planting trees to offset CO2 emissions, in five years time, everyone who drives a car who doesn’t care about the engine or how it corners or even what it looks like, will drive cars that produce the same amount of CO2 per kilometre as I do every time I burp. And then there’ll be some headroom for people like you and I to get down to the serious business of driving.

In fact, I can think of something better than that. In order to be allowed to use petrol, you’ll have to take a basic quiz on cars, with questions no harder than “What car was John Cleland driving when he won the 1995 Touring Car Championship?” or “Name 3 incarnations of the Ferrari 250” – easy stuff! And if you get it right, you can have petrol, and if you don’t, you can drive the new Daihatsu Mains Adaptor, or whatever. Now that’s what I call carbon offsetting!